Here’s a story I found delicious because the misuse of language is only slightly less entertaining than Yogi Berra. The story is headlined “Giuliani faces tough NRA crowd.”

To begin with, reading the story reveals that the “tough crowd” didn’t exactly pepper spray the candidate, or even ask difficult questions; rather, they were reduced to tepid applause and wondering if perhaps they might be able to some day bring themselves to support him even though he’s from New York and “hard” on guns. If Giuliani ever becomes president, he’d better be prepared to face far tougher crowds than this.

Here’s my favorite quote from the story:

“I think he is sincere; I just don’t know if he truly believes it down deep inside,” said Thomas Crum, a retired trucking executive from Scottsdale, Ariz. “I have a little difference with him just beginning to realize what his position really is.”

Mr. Crum, here is what “sincere” means: “free of deceit, hypocrisy, or falseness; earnest.” So if you think he is sincere, then you should know he truly believes it down deep inside. If somehow you think he is sincere but don’t know if he truly believes it, then you are having thoughts that are disconnected from knowledge — not surprising given the environment you found yourself in during Giuliani’s speech. This may be a medical condition called psychosis, one you should have checked out.

Someone else at the NRA event struggled with sincerity’s close kin, truthfulness:

Sitting next to Bell at lunch Friday, Joe Rogers was keeping a scorecard for each of the presidential candidates on the conference’s brochure. While some speakers had check marks, Giuliani was the only one with a zero next to his name. The Wilmington, N.C. salesman said even Democratic presidential candidate and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson scored better during his taped remarks.

“I don’t think there’s anything he could have said and been truthful about to win over the crowd,” Rogers said of Giuliani. “To his credit, he spoke the truth.”

From this, I take it that Mr. Rogers is saying Giuliani could have won some of the crowd over had he chosen to lie, something some of the crowd would have welcomed (although not Rogers himself); most of the crowd awards no credit for truth. Given the track record of the GOP from Reagan to present, I believe the crowd is going to be delighted with what it’s getting. And that Giuliani would be better off drinking that particular flavor of Kool-Aid now so he can get used to it for the long months to come.

In the 20 years I’ve been in LA, there have been about 20 self-help fads. To my knowledge, not one yet has embraced the handbook of the stoics, which involves actual self-discipline, which is hard. Rather, they are based upon fuzzy feel-good philosophy ungrounded in logic, science, or rigorous thinking. (Which always brings to mind Mr. David Bowie’s retort, from “Fashion”: “I’m okay, you’re so-so.”)

The most recent of these fads is The Secret. This book, with accompanying cult, purports that all human success is linked by one phenomenon — which turns out to be the Power of Positive Thinking. Why anyone would think this “secret” eludes me; hasn’t this been practically canonical for 75 years?

I could go on about the cult of The Secret, which is claiming friends and colleagues left and right, but I think media theorist Douglas Rushkoff has already done an excellent job. Below is a posting he sent via his newsgroup. (And thank you, Doug, for saving me the time in writing something similar.)

Before I get to that, let me float one more idea: That we should never discount the Power of Negative Thinking. By that I mean good old skepticism, the sort that keeps most of us from buying swampland in Florida or bridges owned by the government. Positive Thinking has its obvious benefits, but it’s skepticism that keeps us alive and well and not falling for the lure of snake charmers.

New Pseudoscience Patina, Same Snake Oil
The Secret’s self-help message is just common knowledge.
by Douglas Rushkoff

As the saying goes, opposites attract, as when an electron races to a positively charged ion, or the north pole of a magnet pulls the south pole of another. But try telling that to proponents of The Secret, the latest in a long line of spiritual systems aimed at selling
personal prosperity through faulty scientific reasoning.

In case you’ve missed it on Oprah or Larry King Live, The Secret is a self-help DVD and companion book synthesizing the pitches of a few dozen of today’s most prominent self-help gurus. Its creator, an Australian named Rhonda Byrne, claims there’s a single truth
underlying all these systems. It’s more ancient than the Bible and has been intentionally hidden from human beings for just as long. The great secret? Positive thinking. Abundance is a state of mind: Think healthy, and you’ll be healthy. Or more to the point, think rich, and you’ll get rich. Most of the spiritual teachers in The Secret are wealth-seminar leaders who display the book’s logo on their Web sites. The Secret has certainly worked wonders for its marketers: More than 1.5 million DVDs have been sold, and the book hit number one on The New York Times best-seller list of hardcover advice books.

While positive thinking no doubt has its benefits—from the placebo effect to good old self-confidence—The Secret tries to justify itself
not only in the language of pop psychology but in that of modern physics. According to the book, happy thoughts will do more than
affect behavior. It claims the interrelatedness of matter and energy (a principle proven by Einstein) allows people to change reality to
their liking by changing the way they think about it. (Thought is presumably energy in this schema, and reality is matter.) For most,
however, this potential for cosmic transmutation is limited to attracting more money into their personal bank accounts.

To be sure, it’s entertaining to marvel at Masaru Emoto, a Japanese alternative healer who claims that crystals grow more symmetrically inside bottles labeled with positive messages than in those with negative messages attached. But such “results” can be explained by the observer’s tendency to notice the crystals he is looking for rather than the ones that don’t fit his expectations. That’s why people basing psychiatric therapies on pseudoscientific research will get mixed results at best. Stick a Post-it note with a positive
message on a schizophrenic’s forehead and see how far you get changing the water molecules in his brain into happy ones.

Meanwhile, a growing arsenal of healing machines based loosely on tenuous nonlocality theories from the fringes of quantum physics have become an increasingly popular alternative to the discomfort of scientifically verifiable chemotherapy. With names like SCIO and
Rife, these machines don’t even need to be in the same room or city as the patient they’re treating—since, as their proponents reason, quantum mechanics doesn’t recognize physical distance. Sure, if this “energetic medicine” makes a person feel better or more optimistic— and doesn’t delay or replace therapies that might actually work— there’s no harm except to the wallet.

So why bother condemning all this wishful thinking? After all, who of us hasn’t ever experienced a bit of The Secret’s real power? Wearing an expensive suit to an interview or flying first class, as one of The Secret’s featured instructors suggests on his Web site, can make you feel and act differently. Sometimes spending more money does seem to bring more money in, and speaking positively often leads to better results than whining about how tough life is.

But such techniques are hardly new, let alone secret. Like mastering the will through self-hypnosis or better negotiating through body
language, the “power of positive thinking” has nearly a century-old track record among car dealers, admen, and others for whom attitude means as much as, if not more than, attributes. It’s from this universe of phantom values and socially constructed truths that The Secret derives its ultimate power. Try sharing The Secret with some refugees from Darfur; you’ll probably find the results are not
terribly impressive.

No, The Secret is best applied in the same foggy arenas from which it emerged. It’s great for self-help gurus, spiritual evangelists,
salespeople, and multilevel marketers because it’s based in the same kinds of mythology on which they’ve always relied: There’s a timeless principle, a preexisting law of nature only now becoming understood by science but completely easy for you to use to make your life better.

Just pay me, and I’ll share it with you.

Always choose your URL wisely.

(Thanks to Kimberly Glann for sending this in.)

All of these are legitimate companies that didn’t spend quite enough time considering how their online names might appear … and be misread. These are not made up. Check them out yourself!

1. “Who Represents” is where you can find the name of the agent that represents any celebrity. Their Web site is www.whorepresents.com

2 . Experts Exchange is a knowledge base where programmers can exchange advice and views at www.expertsexchange.com

3. Looking for a pen? Look no further than Pen Island at www.penisland.net

4. Need a therapist? Try Therapist Finder at www.therapistfinder.com

5. There’s the Italian Power Generator company, www.powergenitalia.com

6. And don’t forget the Mole Station Native Nursery in New South Wales , http://www.molestationnursery.com/

7. If you’re looking for IP computer software, there’s always http://www.ipanywhere.com/

8. The First Cumming Methodist Church Web site is www.cummingfirst.com

9. And the designers at Speed of Art await you at their wacky Web site, http://www.speedofart.com

Over on Slate, they’re serializing the new graphic novel about Ronald Reagan’s life. I don’t know whether or not the printed version is in color, but the online edition is black and white — which seems perfect, because the entire enterprise seems close to a whitewash. Not since George Washington and the cherry tree have we seen such hagiography in service to a dead president. Not only that, the caricatures are bad.

Want to judge for yourself? Click here.

For me the identify of the writer is perhaps the most distressing aspect of this. I expect to disagree with some people about Ronald Reagan and his legacy (which I sum up as turning a blind eye to AIDS, plunging us into debt, manipulating the (non)release of hostages to help secure his election, starting an illegal and undeclared war south of our border, dealing arms to Iran, and launching the government investigation into our bedrooms and bookshelves). But I didn’t expect it to be Andy Helfer. In the late 1980’s, Helfer was the writer of a relaunched comic about the Shadow that brilliantly brought an absurdist filter to the subject. From wikipedia:

In the late 1980s, another DC reincarnation was created by Howard Chaykin, Andy Helfer, Bill Sienkiewicz, and Kyle Baker, in a miniseries and sequel ongoing series. This version brought The Shadow to modern day New York. While initially successful, this version was not popular with “Shadow” traditionalists, because it depicted The Shadow using Uzi submachineguns and rocket launchers, as well as featuring a strong strain of black comedy throughout. It was canceled after an issue in which the Shadow’s head was transplanted onto a robot body.

While I have endlessly recycled thousands of comics over the years (thank you, eBay), I have held onto those. They are wonderful reading. Now it’ll be harder to enjoy them, knowing that 20 years later the writer is plumping for the guy who put all the mental patients out on the street while enriching his friends through an illegal war.

In our graduate writing program at USC, one of the things taught is creative non-fiction. Every so often I’ll have to explain to a lay person what “creative non-fiction” is, because it sounds oxymoronic. In essence, it’s a novelistic approach to factual events. (For an example, read Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood.” Or anything coming out of the White House.)

This morning’s newspapers had me thinking about creative non-fiction, or fictionalized reporting, or something akin, as I studied two rather different versions of the same story.

From today’s Los Angeles Daily News, I learned “Heat wave blamed in 12 deaths.” (That’s the headline.) That sounds pretty bad. Except the front of today’s LA Times reports, “Heat blamed in the deaths of at least 16.” So it’s either 12, or it’s at least 16. I don’t know which is true, and their mutual placement on my breakfast table casts doubt on both. It also leaves me wondering if there isn’t another verb except “blamed.” How about “Heat wave claims 16 lives”?

Reading further, I discover that “one of the deaths is a Pasadena woman in her 80s whose body was discovered in her apartment, where the temperature was 115 degrees.” (LA Times)

Except the Daily News reports “82-year-old Lugassi Max Menahem and his wife… were among a dozen residents believed to have died from the weeklong heat wave. … Their apartment window was open, letting the 110-degree air in, and their working air conditioner was turned off.”

I applaud the Daily News for the vivid irony in its reporting (a dead couple found lying beside a working air conditioner that would have saved them). I don’t find the dead spouse in Times. Even more troubling, the Daily News says it was 110, the LA Times says it was 115, and I suspect that both are reporting from an official report rather than stationing journalists outside with thermometers to personally check the temperature. If that’s so, why does the official quoted, or the official report quoted, disagree in these two stories?

Apply this sort of thinking toward the war in Iraq. Or any other news reporting. This is not an arena where one wants creative non-fiction.

Some years ago I wrote an absurdist play entitled “Uncle Hem” in which a family’s reality comes unglued because they can’t agree on basic facts, including what they read in the newspaper. The following exchange is based on coverage of the day, in which every major newspaper save one reported the dire consequences of a passenger jet. The sole holdout, the relentlessly positive USA Today, rejoiced in the miracle of  survivors. (By this logic, more than 220 million Americans have survived the war in Iraq.)

MUM
But is that yesterday’s paper? You’ve read everything in it?

DAD
I just finished the legals.

MUM
Then it’s at least yesterday’s. But you read one newspaper, it says
“Plane crash disaster: 39 killed!” You read the other, it says, “Plane
crash miracle: 61 survive!” That could be last weekend’s
newspaper, with the wrong date. Or we could have the wrong
weekend in mind for Uncle Hem’s visit. Or that could be last year’s
newspaper and you’re a very slow reader.

DAD
When the new one comes I’ll compare them. I’ll compare the dates.

MUM
Claude, I already compared two newspapers! Two liars! Don’t
trust either one of them!

DAD
I don’t know what to think.

MUM
Oh, you’re like a bit of fluff in a hurricane.

What is it? The war in Iraq. If you can stomach it, read this piece in Rolling Stone detailing the malfeasance and vast personal enrichment underlying the buildup and “rebuilding.” (In fact, please stomach it — these were our dollars, and we need to be angry.)

Compared to the profiteering on this war, the savings and loan bailout under Bush 1 is small potatoes indeed.

Arthur Miller’s play “All My Sons” now looks quaint.

As does the notion of shame.

This week’s New Yorker has an excellent appraisal of Philip K. Dick by Adam Gopnik. You can read it here.

Dick, for those who’ve only recently tuned into this blog, is a writer whose work I’ve been following closely for 30 years. I’ve read almost all of his books (I’m still trying to get through the excruciating mainstream novel “Voices from the Street” — if “trying to get through” means “allowing it to collect dust on my nightstand.”), as well as a few biographies. Gopnik does a good job of looking at Dick’s body of work, correcting some strongly held bad judgments or misperceptions by Dick’s ardent admirers, and placing him where he more aptly belongs. Among other salient points, he:

• locates Dick as a satirist, alongside Swift, identifying “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch” as a take on middle-class escapism, “Clans of the Alphane Moon” as a take on the Johnson-Nixon years, and “Ubik,” most hilariously, as a perverse cultural wish-fulfillment dream, one where people can actually speak with the dead, “but, when you go to speak with them, there is static and missed connections and interference, and then you argue over your bill.”
• downgrades “The Man in the High Castle” (“the book that made Dick famous”) in favor of “his masterpiece,” “Ubik.” I concur, but would add a masterpiece: “Confessions of a Crap Artist.”
• corrects the notion that Dick was somehow neglected in his lifetime. “You can find unfairly neglected writers in America; Dick, with a steady and attentive transatlantic audience, was never one of them.” Let me just say that, somehow, in a house in the woods of southern New Jersey far from any bookstore and in the early 1970’s before the creation of Amazon.com, that house somehow had dozens of Philip K. Dick books. So he couldn’t have been that obscure.
• and, finally, he concludes that while “all this remains thrilling and funny … the trouble is that, much as one would like to place Dick above or alongside Pynchon and Vonnegut — or, for that matter, Chesterton or Tolkien — as a poet of the fantastic parable he was a pretty bad writer. Though his imagination is at least the equal of theirs, he had, as he ruefully knew, a hack’s habits….” While I disagree that Dick won’t be ranked alongside Vonnegut (he already is), or, for some of us, above Tolkien, I will repeat what I said years ago to a friend: “Nobody reads Philip K. Dick for the writing.”

Perhaps Gopnik’s most salient point, in an essay that is overall very smart about its subject and filled with insight, may be this, from his opening:

“There’s nothing more exciting to an adolescent reader than an unknown genre writer who speaks to your condition and has something great about him. … The combination of evident value and apparent secrecy makes Elmore Leonard fans feel more for their hero than Borges lovers are allowed to feel for theirs. … Eventually, enough of these secret fans grow up and get together, and the writer is designated a Genius, acquiring all the encumbrances of genius: fans, notes, annotated editions, and gently disparaging comprehensive reviews.”

Guilty as charged, your honor. But… what is the downside? All readers hope to find writers who “speak to their condition.” In adolescence it may be Philip K. Dick; in college it may be Chaucer and Beckett. In middle adulthood, heaven help us, we may light a pipe and start reading Updike seriously. If we want writers who don’t speak to us, I’m sure we can find them. Personally, I could start reading Mitch Albom, or all those people who write books about their dog.

Philip K. Dick never believed anything directly in front of him. I don’t know why, but neither have I. I wish the bad writing were better, but I can overlook it because the rest of the view is so eye-opening. I’m glad Gopnik doesn’t hold Dick’s science fiction genre against him. As I remind my students, Samuel Beckett, darling of existentialist artists, was a fan of detective fiction. Just because it’s genre doesn’t mean it isn’t worthy.

 Former teen heartthrob has built a 1/5 scale model of Disneyland in his back yard.

This makes me think of “The Music of Chance,” by Paul Auster, in which a grieving man and his ne’er-do-well partner are forced into indentured servitude and made to build a medieval wall in the back yard of two lottery-winning yokels who, it seems, also have a mini-scale replica of their home town occupying an entire room of their mansion.

Whether or not truth is stranger than fiction, they are certainly on speaking terms.

—————-
Now playing: The Beach Boys – Surf’s Up
via FoxyTunes

As you’ll see below, a man “killed” a rattlesnake, beheaded it — and then suffered a venomous bite from the head when she stooped to pick it up. This Associated Press story shows us just how out-of-touch with nature most of us — and especially the media — have become.

I say this because, where I grew up, I thought it was common knowledge among people who lived in rattlesnake climes that the severed head of a rattlesnake could (and would) still bite you; it was certainly knowledge among me and my 10-year-old friends.

I say that also because the AP has reported this event as news.

Beheaded rattlesnake sends man to hospital

Rural Washington man thinks he’s killed the reptile and is then bitten by it

PROSSER, Wash. – Turns out, even beheaded rattlesnakes can be dangerous.

That’s what 53-year-old Danny Anderson learned as he was feeding his horses Monday night, when a 5-foot rattler slithered onto his central Washington property, about 50 miles southeast of Yakima.

Anderson and his 27-year-old son, Benjamin, pinned the snake with an irrigation pipe and cut off its head with a shovel. A few more strikes to the head left it sitting under a pickup truck.

“When I reached down to pick up the head, it raised around and did a backflip almost, and bit my finger,” Anderson said. “I had to shake my hand real hard to get it to let loose.”

Venom was spreading
His wife insisted they go to the hospital, and by the time they arrived at Prosser Memorial Hospital 10 minutes later, Anderson’s tongue was swollen and the venom was spreading. He then was taken by ambulance 30 miles to a Richland hospital to get the full series of six shots he needed.

A few minutes ago I made a mistake typing in a URL, and so, instead of MSNBC.com, I wound up on msbc.com, the website of Morningstar Baptist Church. Here’s what I learned both from the home page and this podcast:

1. If Hillary Clinton becomes president, we’re going to Hell. (This seems to be meant literally.)
2. Hillary is “a jezebel.” (Although it isn’t made clear why.)
3. Obama is indeed kin to Osama in some way.
4. Giuliani is no better because he’s pro-homosexual.
5. Martin Luther King Jr. was “a nut. Check the FBI files.”
6. That it used to be a law, an actual law, that you had to bear arms and that maintain your arms in good working order. Evidently, this was a law in the 17th Century.  And for proof, we should read the book of Romans. (Which, if I recall, predates firearms.)
7. If Hillary gets in, “be prepared to die.”

This educational message brought to you at no charge.